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Sunday, 13 November 2016

"Brontë fansin Yorkshire have the opportunity to be part of avery special preview screeningofTo Walk Invisible,BBC One’soriginal one-off drama written and directed by multi BAFTA winnerSally Wainwright, which was filmed in and around Yorkshire." This is part of an announcement to be found on a BBC page which can be found here.

Sally Wainwright will be there too, in conversation with 5 live's Anna Foster, along with Executive Producer Faith Penhale.

Tickets will be allocated by random draw, with three quarters of them going to West Yorkshire postcodes and a quarter going to the rest of the UK. You can register at any time until Monday 21 November, and you can apply for a maximum of two tickets.

The screening is at Hebden Bridge Picture House 6pm Tuesday 13 December.

Thursday, 27 October 2016

Writer Blake Morrison spoke to the thriving Brussels Brontë Group recently. Helen McEwan sent us this report, which also appears on our sister blog - the Brussels Brontë Blog.

Blake Morrison
began his talk by drawing out parallels between his own childhood and the
Brontës’. He told us about growing up near Skipton close to the Yorkshire-Lancashire
border, in an old rectory at the top of the village, not far from Pendle Hill
where the ‘Pendle Witches’ famous in local legend were hanged in 1612. His
mother was Irish and his father, as a doctor (in fact both parents were
doctors) was an important man in the village just as Patrick Brontë the parson
was in Haworth. He told us about reading Jane
Eyre in secret as a teenager – in secret because it was not considered
boys’ reading in the laddish Yorkshire culture of the time; it was not on the
curriculum at the boys’ grammar school he attended – and about the affinity he
felt with the young Jane and the novel’s power as a book for young adults.
Blake told us how he found out that his mother was hiding her copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover in her bedside
table around the same time that he was hiding his of Jane Eyre (a novel that when it first came out was also regarded as
a ‘naughty’ book!).

Blake went on to
tell us how he came to write his play about the Brontës, We are three sisters. First he recounted how an earlier
Brontë-inspired stage production, a musical version of Wuthering Heights he wrote in 1986, was never performed; four other
musical versions of the novel were doing the rounds at the time and in the end Heathcliff with lyrics by Tim Rice,
starring Cliff Richard, was the only one to be staged. To give us a taste of his
own version of Wuthering Heights, Blake
read us the ballad Isabella’s Song,
which starts:

As I stepped out one
summer night
to feed my white ring-dove
a shadow fell across the gate
and swore undying love.

The shadow stretched
out tall and slim,
its face was black as night.
It spoke to me of wedding-rings
and bridesmaids bathed in light ….

The full poem
can be read in his book of verse A discoverie
of Witches (2012) prompted by the Pennine landscape in which he grew up. In
a very different mood, the collection also includes the Ballad of the Yorkshire Ripper, an exploration - in dialect - of
the deeds and motives of Peter Sutcliffe, convicted of killing 13 women in
1981. Morrison has never shrunk from tackling such subjects, and has written a
book on the James Bulger murder case.

Turning to the
genesis of his play We Are Three Sisters,
in which he took up the challenge of re-writing Chekhov’s play with Charlotte,
Emily and Anne as the sisters, Blake told us that when a theatre critic friend first
suggested the idea to him, he dismissed it as ‘bonkers’. He was however
persuaded to go ahead with the project by the artistic director of the theatre
company Northern Broadsides, which staged the play in 2011.

Sophia di Martino, Catherine Kinsella and Rebecca Hutchinson as the
Brontës in Northern Broadsides' production of Blake Morrison's We Are
Three Sisters. Photograph: Nobby Clark

In Blake’s play,
Moscow, to which Chekhov’s three sisters long to go, has become London, and,
similarly, various characters in the Chekhov play are replaced by equivalent
characters from the Brontës’ circle (their doctor, Patrick’s curate). Blake
explained that although he used the Brontës own words in his text where
possible, the use of Chekhov’s play as a basis meant he had to take some
liberties with the Brontës’ life story, with sometimes amusing results. For example,
in his play the woman with whom Branwell is believed to have had an affair, his
employer’s wife Lydia Robinson, turns up at the Parsonage, which she never
visited in real life. Members of our group read out extracts from two scenes in
the play: Charlotte and Anne telling Emily about their trip to reveal their
identity to the publisher George Smith in London, and Charlotte telling her
father about the publication of Jane Eyre.

Contrary to the
common perception of the Brontës’ lives as eventless, Blake found them full of
interest and drama and wanted to show Haworth as less bleak than it is
generally portrayed. His play has many touches of humour and he describes it as
a ‘tragi-comedy’, much like the original Chekhov.

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In the course of the talk, in addition to some
of his poems, Blake read us extracts from his memoir And when did you last see your father? Made into a film in 2007
starring Jim Broadbent and Colin Firth, it contains many memories of his
childhood. By the end of his time with us we had gained many insights into his
personal background and the wide range of his literary output as well as
becoming acquainted with his Brontë play.

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Tuesday, 11 October 2016

Andrea Arnold's brutally realistic take on Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights made waves in 2011 and is still making waves today, from the responses of the seventy or so in the audience of the Courtyard Theatre of the West Yorkshire Playhouse last night - which consisted mainly of one enthusiastic school party. It was an excellent choice to stimulate debate and raise questions, especially if A Levels are in mind.

An impressively knowledgeable panel was assembled on the stage under the title Brontës on Stage and Screen, to discuss artists' approaches to Brontë adaptations. Linda Marshall-Griffiths spoke about her reading of Villette and the way it influenced her interpretation of it, David Nixon, Artistic Director of Northern Ballet, said that he turned back to the original novel frequently during the process of creating a dance version, Nancy Meckler from Shared Experience recalled her wildly successful collaborations with Polly Teale and Michael Lawrence, Reader in Film Studies at the University of Sussex, spoke eloquently about Andrea Arnold's methods and motivations, and the way the film attacked existing conventions on how classical literature was represented on screen.

Friday, 30 September 2016

Charlotte Brontë’s Villette,
which was recognised by knowledgeable readers in nineteenth century Brussels as
a close parallel for what actually happened when its author was teaching
cosseted Catholic girls in the Pennsionat, is not generally esteemed for its
plot, but for its exquisite characterisations and the way the shy, repressed,
unmarried and fiercely Protestant central character Lucy Snowe gives vent to
her thoughts and emotions throughout the novel. It is outstanding in Victorian
literature for its psychological intensity and its honest scrutiny of female
consciousness.

There are few dramatic possibilities in it, compared
to Jane Eyre, but it has, apparently,
been successfully adapted for radio. Stage and film versions have been sparse in
number and unmemorable. Therefore, the version scripted by Linda
Marshall-Griffiths for the Courtyard Theatre of the West Yorkshire Playhouse as
part of its current Brontë Season was keenly anticipated by many, especially
people who have read the novel. On the night I saw it, most of the Parsonage
staff were there. There had been a few clichéd journalistic comments previously
along the lines of “Brontë purists might not like this…” because this version
is set in the future. The summary of the new version sounded promisingly interesting,
and Linda Marshall-Griffiths is undoubtedly bold, brave and imaginative. In her
own words:

“In re-imagining Villette,
I asked myself who is the invisible woman now, who would she be in the future?
I began thinking of a clone – easily disposed of, created like a worker-ant,
identical and made purely to work. A clone that survived a pandemic that killed
her two identical sisters. As Charlotte Brontë used to catch glimpses of what
she thought was her sisters in paintings and crowds, my Lucy Snowe is haunted
by her own face and the past that both terrorises and holds her. I moved the
setting of Villette onto an archeological dig in the future. Lucy Snowe flees
her past to become part of a team looking for the bones of the Lady of Villette
– a survivor herself, she may hold the key to an ebola-like virus…”(from the YYP leaflet)

In the event, this play would have been most easily
followed by those Brontë purists, the ones in spotless white perhaps, the ones
who could compare the characters in the novel with those on stage and follow
the storyline, which on the whole adheres to the original pattern. There are just
five actors on stage (theatre economics of course), and much has been cut –
inevitably. For example Ginevra Fanshawe, here ‘Gin’ (and Polly) is played by
Amelia Donkor as a hedonistic dancer and slinky party-goer who prefers to go to
the Day of the Dead celebrations rather than hang around in a boring laboratory.

Day of the Dead? Is there a Mexican connection? Is it a linking reference to the bones of the Lady of Villette in the onstage archeological trench? Not clear. It is
just one of the things which lead to possible confusion, because the play is hard
to get to grips with and occasionally incoherent. Disbelief is not easily suspended. The
characters are sketchy and do not develop: Beck, for example, the equivalent of
Madame Beck, Charlotte Brontë’s version of the sly wife of the man she loved,
is played simply as a kind of workplace bully with an obsession for
surveillance by a very under-used Catherine Cusack. Nana Amoo-Gottfried gives us
the makings of a good, amiable John Bretton, and should also have been offered more
material through which to display his talents.

Amelia Donkor (Gin) and Laura Elsworthy (Lucy Snowe)

After the first quarter of an hour or so, when I was
wondering whether this was something out of Doctor
Who, Laura Elsworthy, playing Lucy Snowe, was filling me with admiration
for her strenuous efforts to portray a journey out of repression and into the realm of
love, but she became wearing after a while, especially towards the end of the
over-long first half, when she is placed at a raised front corner and engages directly
with the audience. As an actor, she must have had some problems getting into the mind of one
of three identical clones created by a scientist father (her two sisters, named
Esme and Ashe, are dead) or showing that she has real sparks of humanity. Elsworthy
does her best with what she is given, but her clunky, awkward utterances, her
jerky movements and her lengthy agony-stricken diatribes, delivered
expressionist-style, are just too much. And where did that Catholic priest come
from? A dream? Mexico?

The second half gave some relief. Lucy became much more
human, and the audience even laughed as she sat on a blanket and opened a picnic
basket with the gauche Paul (Philip Cairns) to participate in a comically
awkward conversation, perhaps the best part of the play. Neither of the
characters knew what a picnic was, they had previously admitted, but the basket
was to hand and they soon found out.

The admirable boldness of the playwright’s
vision made this production watchable. On the night I saw it, a group of what
seemed to be sixth formers were chatting noisily afterwards. They had not read
the original and confessed to being confused, but they liked the play as a strange puzzle – and they were most intrigued
by the enigmatic ending. It might make a good television version one day.

Postings on this blog reflect the views of the individual writers.

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Monday, 19 September 2016

Quite a few years ago I
purchased a replica set of toy soldiers from the museum shop at the Parsonage
for my godson. He enjoyed many hours of imaginative play with them - there were
make believe battles, disasters and a few wore a set of badly made uniforms
made by yours truly!

Nearly two hundred years
earlier Branwell Brontë’s original toy soldiers were having adventures of their
own, written about in books the Brontë children made themselves which were less
than thirteen centimetres square. The hand writing was proportionately small
which created no difficulty for the children as they were all- Charlotte the
most- short sighted.These little books
have always fascinated visitors to the museum and have played a big part in
this year’s exhibition, curated by Tracy Chevalier, Charlotte Great and Small.

On Saturday evening (10 September), in
Haworth, an appreciative audience heard Tracy Chevalier talking to two writers
who have both written about miniatures.

Jessie Burton spoke about her
debut novel, The Miniaturist, which
is set in seventeenth century Amsterdam, and how she was inspired by a
visit to the Rijksmuseum. Her novel is based on a doll’s house she saw there
which had belonged to the wife of a silk merchant- Petronella Oortman - who had
furnished it lavishly. It was interesting to learn that Burton herself had been
given a miniature writing desk by a friend on which was placed a tiny replica
book with the title Jane Eyre to be
joined later by another tiny book Burton’s own The Miniaturist.

Grace McCleen, who is
writer-in-residence at the Brontë Parsonage Museum for 2016, said she had
always been interested in miniaturisation, and making miniatures, sometimes up
to fourteen hours at a time, had helped her through a period of illness. She
too spoke about, and read from, her own award winning debut novel The Land of Decoration. The narrator is
a ten year old girl who, with her father, is a member of a fundamentalist sect
who lives in a small town. To escape from the bullying she has to endure she
recreates the town as an elaborate model in her bedroom.

The usual questions and
answers followed and there were differing theories put forward as to why people
create miniatures and why the Brontë children created their own miniature
books. In the case of the Brontës I
feel it may have been an escape and as they followed their heroes in their
adventures they had found for a short time their own sanctuary.For a brief period they were free from the
harsh realities of their lives. Lives where they had no mother, they had lost
two sisters and lived within sight of a crowded graveyard. They would hear
frequently the tolling of the church bell heralding that their father would
soon be conducting the funeral of yet another Haworth resident who had
succumbed to the ignorance, disease and privation which abounded in the hill
top village at that time.

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Sunday, 18 September 2016

I recently came
across what looked like a very interesting book — Push Me Away, written by — Branwell Brontë (!).I started to read the book, and it became
even more interesting than I expected.The
primary story involves Branwell and his reincarnated double, John
Eaglewood.But there is also a supporting
secondary story regarding Emily Brontë, and it was strangely familiar to me.It appears to be based directly on events only
ever described in my novel, Emily’s
Journal.This is a clear case of
plagiarism.Unfortunately, Dr Lambert-Hills,
the actual author of Push Me Away,
permits no true acknowledgments of his sources; the entire production is
fictional including the owner of the copyright (Branwell Brontë); and the
people included on the page of thanks are all fictional characters in the
book.

Sarah Fermi

So this is advice to
anyone reading Push Me Away, who is
wondering where the new material on Emily came from: you canfind
it all in a work of plausible fiction, Emily’s
Journal, by Sarah Fermi,— available from Amazon, and from the Brontë
Parsonage Museum Bookshop.The work was
based on several years of research, and there is a full account of which parts
of the story are true, which are theoretical but probable, and which are fictional.

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Saturday, 17 September 2016

Charlotte Brontë’sVillette, re-imagined by Linda Marshall-Griffiths, opens in the Courtyard Theatre at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds on Saturday 24 September 2016. A review will appear here soon afterwards, hopefully. This is from the Playhouse's publicity:

"Lucy Snowe, alone and abandoned, boards a boat in search of purpose.

"Arriving at an archaeological site digging for the remains of the elusive Lady of Villette, she works alongside the beautiful Gin, the prying Beck, the charming Dr John and the remote Professor Paul, though Lucy remains an outsider.

"Absorbed in her work to find a cure for the next pandemic to secure humanity’s future, can she open herself up to the possibility of love and put the bones of the past behind her?

"On the 200th anniversary ofCharlotte Brontë’sbirth, West Yorkshire Playhouse celebrates her unique genius with a daring new adaptation by a fellow Yorkshire writer, Linda Marshall-Griffiths. With echoes of the illness and loss that wracked Brontë’s own life, both novel and play explore the redemptive power of love and the uncertainty of holding on to it."

On the following Thursday (29 September) at 6.30pm, also at the West Yorkshire Playhouse (Other Space), there will be a discussion in the style of a debate - Jane Eyre versus Villette. A similar event took place in Haworth during the AGM weekend in June, some readers of this blog will recall. This time, speakers for Jane Eyre will be Blake Morrison and Sarah Perry, and speakers for Villette will be Sally Vickers and Ruth Robbins.

For full details of the Brontë Season at the WYP, go to its website here.

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Monday, 5 September 2016

I had done my research in advance and I knew the house
was only open to the public on select days and times, but we were lucky: the
house was open for visitors in the period that we were staying in the area (27
to 31 July 2016), only in the afternoon with guided tours at 2 pm, 3 pm and 4
pm. The estate is well hidden amidst trees and parkland,
and it took us a while to find the entrance. We had to park the car near the
stables and the walled garden, and then a short walktowards the House. We had to register for the
group visit in a little shed next to the house and await the guide’s arrival.
We received a brochure about the house and its history, written by the present
owner, the eleventh baronet, Sir James Graham, which made a very interesting
read. This was a good introduction to the guided tour we were about to receive.

Norton Conyers is a late medieval stately manor house,
a pleasing mix of historic styles, with
Stuart and Georgian additions. It has
been owned by the Graham family (originally from Scottish origin) since 1624
(except for a period of 20 years between 1862 and 1882). The house is steeped in history and has
welcomed a number of noteworthyguests
such as King James II, King Charles I and of course Charlotte Brontë.

With a little delay we went over to the house via the
side-entrance which still contains the bells that rang when service was
required in one of the rooms (each bell having a very specific sound for each
room). We were personallygreeted and
welcomed for our guided tour by Sir James and Lady Graham in the Hall. The
first part of the tour consisted of an introduction by the current owners about
the history of the house, but also about the extensive repair and restoration
work they have been doing since 2005, when they discovered a major death-watch
beetle infestation in the wooden floorboards. Many pictures were shown of how
the house looked like during the restoration work, we could even see some real carcasses
of the destructive beetle, collected by Sir James. During the ongoing restoration
work, fascinating layers of the history of the house
have been uncovered and the owners have been able to carry out 'extensiverescue archeology', as Sir James mentions in
his brochure. The restoration work has been done with great care and a real
passion andrespect for the historic
structure of the house. As a consequence of their remarkable renovation work,
Sir James and Lady Graham received theHistoric Houses Association & Sotheby’s Restoration Award 2014,
which proudly hangs on the wall in the Hall.

The most interesting part for me was of course the
link with Charlotte Brontë, who is said to have visited Norton Conyers in 1839
when she was a governess with the Sidgwick family. Lady Graham pointedout that the restoration works have enhanced
many features of Norton Conyers mentioned by Charlotte Brontë in her
description of Thornfield Hall: the battlements around the roof, the rookery,
the main broad oak staircase, the high square hall covered in family portraits
and of course the famous Mad Woman’s room in the attic.

The 'secret' staircase, hidden behind a door in
the wooden paneling on the landing near the Peacock Room – the supposed model
for Mr. Rochester’’s room in Jane Eyre
– and connecting the first floor to the
attic rooms, was discovered in November 2004 after having been blocked up for
donkey’s years. “There was no way you could tell from outside that there was
anything there,” said Sir James. This discovery aroused world-wide interest
because of the striking similarity with the story of Bertha Mason, the mad wife
of Mr. Rochester locked up in the attic in the novel Jane Eyre. The secret staircase was probably constructed in the
late seventeenth century to provide servants with a short cut from their
sleeping quarters to their workplace. Itwas certainly in use when Charlotte visited and she must have heard the
story of a 'mad' woman called Mary who was
locked in the attic of Norton Conyers in the eighteenth century. In Jane Eyre the staircase is vividly
described by Charlotte and matches the concealed staircase in Norton Conyers
perfectly, now officially also called “The Jane Eyre Staircase”. This story
has most probably inspired Charlotte Brontë when writing Jane Eyre, as has the house itself.

Lady Graham showed us pictures of the staircase and of
Mad Mary’s Room, as the attic room is called, which is situated in a remote
corner of the attic. The attic is not open to the public because of the fragility
of the structure, and the staircase (which is sadly too dangerous for the
public to use) can only be seen from the landing on the first floor. Lady
Graham told us that they plan to restore
the staircase and attic rooms in time, but at the same time respecting and
keeping the specific atmosphere of the Mad Woman’s room, supposedly quite a
depressingand sad room: “this room is
in a cul-de sac in the attic, very awkward to reach, the room is north-facing
with a small gable window, it has a tragic feel about it”.

After this introduction we were allowed to wander
around in the house and visit the rooms opened to the public. Sir James and
Lady Graham stuck around and were very willing to answer any questions. I told
Lady Graham of my interest in the link of Norton Conyers with Charlotte Brontë
and she showed me the library which had been restored and re-furnished with
items that Charlotte would have seen when visiting. She pointed out a few of
these items, such as a pair of globes, a cabinet piano in the window-bay,
painting equipment, the bookcases – most of which are locked apart from one
triangular bookcase in a corner which contains “everything that could be needed
in the way of elementary works” as described in Jane Eyre. The room was re-furnished in accordance with the description
of Mr. Rochester’s study, which was used in the novel by Jane Eyre as a
classroom for Mr. Rochester’s ward Adele Varens.

Apart from the Library the rooms open to the public
are: the Dining Room, the Hall, where we started the tour, the Parlour (all on
the ground floor), the main oak staircase, and on the first floor: the landing with the 'secret' door, the Passage, the Best Bedroom (with a reproduction of
a unique wallpaper design found in an attic cupboard) and King James’s Room, where King James II and his wife stayed during their visit in 1679 - still
displaying the traditional bed they are supposed to have used. Throughout the
house, in all rooms open to the public, you can see a beautiful collection of family
portraits and other paintings related to the house and its inhabitants,
magnificent old furniture, beautiful eighteenth century plaster ceilings and
many other valuable treasures and fine art work.

The house is a real marvel, so lovingly and
passionately restored to its original grandeur, with great attention to detail,
but there is still a lot of work to be done. I was in awe when I finished the
tour. The house has indeed a special
friendly, welcoming atmosphere, which according to Sir James “results from its
having belonged to the same family for three hundred and ninety-two years”. Personally I think it is
also the result of the passion and dedication with which the current owners
have restored and taken care of the house. You can definitely see and feel this
passion in every room you visit. And some hard work has gone into the
restoration, for sure! Thanks are due to
Sir James and Lady Graham for saving this fascinating historic gem for
generations to come.

We still had to visit the walled garden and the
stable block which is also a Grade II-listed building, like the house. It covers over three acres and was
designed in the mid-eighteenth century. It still retains the essential
features of the original design: two paths meeting at the central feature (the
Orangery), flanked by greenhouses, with a small ornamental pond before it and
colourful flower and herbaceous borders everywhere in the garden. It gives the
visitor this feeling of utter tranquility, which we all need once in a while in
our busy lives.What a perfect way of ending this extraordinary visit!

And, for those unmarried souls amongst us, a special
message: Reader, you can marry here! Norton Conyers is indeed a wonderful venue for
weddings and other celebrations.

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More than simply a literary society

The Brontë Society is one of the most important literary societies in the English-speaking world.

Its members come from that world and also from far beyond it, reflecting the continuing international appeal of the extraordinary family from Haworth. Formed in 1893 by a group made up mainly of enthusiastic Yorkshire journalists, the Society has grown into an organisation which has within it people from all callings and professions, all of whom are passionately interested in the lives of the Brontës and in what they created. They are encouraged to take part in the lively democratic processes of the Society, and to attend (if possible) the Annual General Meeting in Haworth, which is part of a festival in the first week of June each year.

Why not join now?

Membership subscriptions play a part in helping to preserve the Parsonage not only as an independent museum (no big government subsidies) but also as a thriving and developing centre for the creative arts, with an energetic and imaginative education programme.